FILM; Satyajit Ray Honored, Without Profit in His Land

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February 16, 1992, Page 002013Buy Reprints The New York Times Archives

Slouched in his favorite leather armchair, a fine wool shawl pulled around his cloud-white cotton pajama-style kurta, Satyajit Ray peers around his familiar study, books and manuscripts stacked and crammed into sagging wooden shelves, a desk smothered with letters -- many congratulatory epistles for winning an Oscar for his life's work -- while an overhead lamp flickers momentarily as Calcutta's persnickety power supply seems to dither over what to do. As he often does, he lets his fingertips play along the edge of his lips, almost as if he wants to sculpt each word, each thought.

In the streets beneath his genteelly shabby and rambling apartment on the third floor of what Indians call a "mansion," horns blat and trucks grind their gears as they attempt to navigate a maelstrom of vehicles, people and ideas. At each sunrise, there seem to be more people, more slums, more garbage, more political rallies, all compressed into a metropolis of blackening buildings, moonscaped roadways and thick swaddlings of air pollution. Visitors shake their heads here, wondering what can become of this city, once so grand and now often politely referred to as a hellhole.

"Calcutta? Where is it going?" the 70-year-old Mr. Ray asks with mock weariness. "The same question has been asked for the last 50 years." He laughs loudly, a deep, euphonious rumble that almost jiggles his china teacup. "It's heading. It's heading. Nobody knows where. But it's heading. Things are happening. People are buying tickets to see theater or cinema, going to concerts, buying books, going to the book fair -- it takes place in all the big cities of India, but it is only in Calcutta that it is a total success."

It is always said that Calcutta is a place of poets and singers, novelists and dreamers. Taxi drivers and postmen, hotel maids and office workers all take up pens and compose and publish. Bengalis here think of themselves as better than other Indians, more intellectual, more thoughtful, less superstitious, less materialistic. Their intellectual saint, Rabindranath Tagore, won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Now, their patron of the screen, Satyajit Ray, has won Hollywood's highest accolade for his moving pictures.

The honorary Academy Award, announced prior to this week's revelation of the traditional nominees in various categories, will be presented March 30 during the annual ceremonies. The citation recognizes Mr. Ray's "rare mastery of the art of motion pictures, and of his profound humanitarian outlook, which has had an indelible influence on film makers and audiences throughout the world." Among directors who have been similarly honored are Akira Kurosawa, Hal Roach, Jean Renoir, Howard Hawks, King Vidor, Charles Chaplin and Orson Welles.

"I'm surprised," admitted Mr. Ray, a tall, lanky man who looks a bit like the silent, gaunt statues on Easter Island. "I'm surprised particularly because my films are not that well known in the States. They are much better known in Britain, Paris certainly now, and even Japan. But obviously there is a certain section, in any case, who like my films. Anyway, it means a lot to me. It means a lot to me because I've learned my craft of making films by watching Hollywood films of the 30's, 40's and 50's. And I never went to a school. That was my school."

It is not only in the United States that Mr. Ray's work is scantily known. Here, few Indians will admit to having seen one of his films. No theater in India is currently showing a movie by him, and it is unlikely, despite the Oscar, that they will. Like that of Bunuel or Renoir or De Sica, or Federico Fellini or even Mr. Kurosawa, Mr. Ray's work is thoughtful, wrenching, uncomfortable, often distressingly quotidian in its explorations. Instead, India's theaters are filled with the commercial froth of Bombay's huge movie studios, what they call Bollywood, which churn out saccharine and predictable stories of love and violence, all liberally lathered with song and dance.

Even in his beloved Calcutta, it is virtually impossible to find a showing of a movie by Mr. Ray. Every few years, for a week or so, a theater will run his latest endeavor, but despite this city's intellectual pretensions, his films rarely run longer. Partly, Mr. Ray says, this is because of the changes sweeping across India, the pressures of work and, perhaps ultimately, television.

"There are still poets and novelists and film makers and whatnot, but not as many as there used to be," he said, his long fingers toying with his pipe. "And the novelists and the poets all have very good jobs with good salaries, and the writing has fallen down. They have no new experience to write from. It's very disappointing. Films, of course, are not doing very well at all because of video partly, partly because the theaters are so badly maintained. In summer, there's no air conditioning. They won't run the air conditioning. They use the fans, the electric fans. The projection is bad. The sound is bad. The seats are bad. I mean, we had some of the finest cinemas in India. But no longer. I have stopped going to the cinema. I watch films on video.

"Video is not the same as films," he continued. "Certain films work all right, like a film like 'Scenes From a Marriage' by Bergman. That sort of thing works all right because that's made with the television in mind, because it's two people talking most of the time in close-up, fighting and quarrelling and loving and whatnot. But, for instance, my first film, 'Pather Panchali': there's a lot of pictorial quality about it. All that is lost. You can hardly see them on the screen. There is such a thing as a special subject for the cinema. One of the reasons why I enjoy making films is that I enjoy also eventually watching the films with the audience. Otherwise, there's no feedback."

Once, in one of his rare lectures about his work, Mr. Ray described what he was trying to do in his early films, and unconciously explained perhaps, why his work seems so shriveled on television.

"You had to find out yourself how to catch the hushed stillness of dusk in a Bengali village," he said, "when the wind drops and turns the ponds into sheets of glass dappled by the leaves of the trees, and the smoke from ovens settles in wispy trails over the landscape, and the plaintive blows on conch shells from homes far and wide are joined by the chorus of crickets, which rises as the light falls, until all one sees are the stars in the sky, and the stars blink and swirl in the thickets."

It was in 1955 that Mr. Ray filmed "Pather Panchali," the first realistic look at life in the Bengal countryside and the problems individuals and families wrestle with, a picture far from the idealized notions of rural life portrayed in the commercial song-and-dance films beginning to take hold in India. He went on to complete two other films -- "Aparajito" (1956) and "The World of Apu" (1959) -- following the protagonist in "Pather Panchali" from adolescence to adulthood, through tragedy to a sort of spiritual renewal, from rural naivete to glossy urbanism. Together the three films became known as the "Apu Trilogy," and they established Mr. Ray as one of the world's finest directors.

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In 1955, the Museum of Modern Art in New York gave "Pather Panchali" its United States premiere; and in 1981, it gave Mr. Ray a retrospective. "We consider Satyajit Ray one of the great film makers of all time," said Mary Lea Bandy, the director of the museum's department of film. "I think he ranks as one of the great humanists in cinema, and he has done a great deal to influence film making and to demystify India."

But film is not Mr. Ray's only pursuit. Like all Bengalis, he has been propelled into other realms by his catholic curiosities. Indeed, the reluctance of India movie houses to show his films means that many Indians know him better as an author of a detective series and several works of science fiction dealing with the derring-do of the mysterious Professor Shonku, inventor of the micromagnascope. He has also written a popular children's book, "The Golden Fortress," which later was made into a thriller, and he edits Sandesh, a children's magazine. "Some of the stories I have written," he wrote in an introduction to one of his collections, "reflect my love of Verne and Wells and Conan Doyle, whose works I read as a schoolboy."

Despite his own health problems -- two heart attacks and bypass surgery -- Mr. Ray has plunged on. "I will tell you what happened," he said, his storytelling impulse bubbling to the surface. "After my bypass surgery, for four years I did nothing. I was not allowed to do anything. Finally the doctor said, 'You can make a film, but you have to make it entirely in the studio. I won't let you work on location.' So for the first time in my life I adapted a play, Ibsen's 'Enemy of the People.' I shot it entirely in the studio. But I Indianized it. Well, in his play, the spa water is polluted. But there is no such thing as a spa in India, so I converted it into a temple tank that people drank from. That was polluted. That caused all the drama." This film, released under the title "Ganashatru" was received unkindly by many of India's critics, critics who have traditionally been admiring of his work despite its lack of commercial appeal.

Undeterred, Mr. Ray went back to his camera and returned with a film that has unsettled many of his Indian viewers. The film, "Shakha Proshakha," or "Branches and Trees," examines a father's awakening to his sons' moral corruption despite his own determined, almost Gandhian, rectitude. In Mr. Ray's characteristic fashion, the themes of family transition, betrayal and tragedy are superimposed upon India's changing face, the contrast between small-town life and the virtues inherent in family life there, and the veneer and sophisticated alienations of urban existence. His film portrays not only a father's disillusionment but hints at the fragility of Indian moral values as an invading modernity rearranges the priorities of the new generation. "You can see corruption in India, can't you," sighed Mr. Ray. "At every level. At every level. I don't know what it means for India."

The idea for his most recent film, unreleased yet and for which he has not settled on a title, came to him after delving into the work of the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. As in "Shakha Proshakha," Mr. Ray again looks for the inner soul of man, this time asking whether truth and wisdom inhere in the simplicity of primitive peoples. "This film," Mr. Ray said, "questions urban civilization. The idea came to me of civilization itself."

These films, like his others, are unlikely to find a wide audience in India, yet Mr. Ray continues to believe that his work is meant first and foremost for the eyes of his countrymen, for average Indians, if only they would take time to watch. This, he laments, is not true for the crop of new young directors in Calcutta who aspire to follow in his footsteps.

"In Calcutta," he said, "what happens is that the young film makers make films which are shown privately to friends and small cinemas. They slap each others' backs and say, 'How wonderful.' Then the films are sent immediately to the festival, get some good reviews from English critics, maybe even win a prize. But they are never released in Calcutta.

"I think that's a horrible situation because I never made films without my own audience in mind. I never made films for England or America. I make films for Bengalis to watch."

India's critics puzzle over Hollywood's recognition of his work. "Belated," is an adjective that has seen prominence in newspapers in recent weeks. In fact, there is a touch of irony to Mr. Ray's Oscar, for it contrasts with his own rather difficult association with America's movie capital. Once, in 1968, he attempted to have a screenplay of his produced there. It was called "The Alien" and recounted the tale of a young Indian village boy who encounters an extraterrestrial, a script illustrated with Mr. Ray's own drawings of space creatures with large heads and wispy bodies. Despite the widespread circulation of Mr. Ray's script, it was never produced.

Now, though, it does not seem to matter much to Mr. Ray. He has plans to return to his camera before traveling to Hollywood for the Oscar ceremony, a trip he will combine with a visit to his cardiologists in Texas. "I could kill two birds with one stone," he said.

In the meantime, Mr. Ray responds to his well-wishers' letters, frets over where to put the bounty of flowers that arrives daily and watches movies on his television.

"I started as a film fan, writing letters to Deanna Durbin and Ginger Rogers," he admits. "I look at Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire quite often. Astaire is incredible. There's no one like Fred Astaire, even the early comics like Buster Keaton and Chaplin and all the rest. I've been watching them again and they haven't faded, you see."

A version of this article appears in print on February 16, 1992, on Page 2002013 of the National edition with the headline: FILM; Satyajit Ray Honored, Without Profit in His Land. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe